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International Security

Decisive measures must be taken by nations and international organizations to ensure mutual survival and safety. In the past several years, key governments and multilateral institutions have devoted considerable effort to the task of more effectively integrating development and security policy responses to the related challenges of countries affected by conflict, post-conflict peacebuilding, and conflict prevention. The looming deadline of the Millennium Development Goals, has focused attention on this important nexus and the near impossibility of crisis- and conflict-affected states achieving these goals unless development and security is more effectively integrated. Despite progress on several fronts, including at the United Nations and at the international financial institutions, developing policy for effective development and security engagement remains a challenge in both conceptual and operational terms – not least because discussion of political, security, economic, and humanitarian issues traditionally has occurred in different multilateral fora, among different sets of stakeholders.

Consequently, coherent and integrated development, security and political support to countries emerging from conflict has proven difficult. Organizing the international response around early support to economic recovery, livelihoods, and services, and the core task of statebuilding has proven a greater challenge. Core political, security, economic, and humanitarian tasks are carried out by an ad hoc and fragmented array of bilateral and multilateral development actors. CIC’s focus is to aid global actors in creating more effective and everlasting security.

Related Publications

On April 24th and 25th, the President of the UN General Assembly will lead a thematic debate on ensuring stable and peaceful societies. CIC Senior Fellow David Steven, at the request of the President of the General Assembly, has prepared a memo which highlights why peace and stability is important for sustainable development and how it might be addressed in the post-2015 development agenda. The outcome of this discussion will be included in the President's summary and will be available as an input in the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals.

The paper Fueling a New Order? The New Geopolitical and Security Consequences of Energy examines impacts of the major transformation in international energy markets that has begun. The United States is poised to overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world’s largest oil producer and, combined with new developments in natural gas, is on track to become the dominant player in global energy markets. Meanwhile, China is in place to surpass the United States in its scale of oil imports, and has already edged out the U.S. in carbon emissions.

America, Rising Powers, and the Tension between Rivalry and Restraint

"What’s become clear to me is that while the rising powers--principally China, India, Brazil, but also Turkey, Indonesia, Korea and others--want to increase their influence and protect their interests, the United States still occupies a central place in their thinking and their strategies. And only the U.S. can help all these players forge an effective international order." —Bruce Jones

Past Events

This high-level dialogue will underscore the power of multilateralism to address the world’s most urgent challenges, among them, climate change, sustainable development, protracted humanitarian crises, large-scale human rights abuse, and threats to international peace and security. They are complex, global, cross-border issues that countries cannot address on their own.

Bringing together the Presidents of the General Assembly, ECOSOC, and the Security Council, the dialogue will underscore the value of discussing development, peace and security, and human rights in support of collective objectives.

Non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) are now the dominant form of contemporary warfare, substantially outnumbering traditional inter-state armed conflicts (IACs). UN Security Council practice is not a source generally cited as evidence of norms regulating NIACs. Descriptions of the Council as an essentially “political” body have been used to suggest that the obligations it imposes form no coherent pattern and have little relation to otherwise applicable rules of international law.